


So Still and Discreet

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Study, Developing Relationship, F/F, Pre-Canon, of sorts, u g h they were so in love y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 11:16:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: It's winter when Hurley's put on the case.





	So Still and Discreet

**Author's Note:**

> b o y i relistened to petals to the metal the other week and got So Emo over these to so here we are
> 
> title from hozier's "in a week"

It's winter when Hurley's put on the case.

The wind is still chilly, running its fingers through her curls and tracing the bridge of her nose every chance it gets. It creeps under her scarf, into the arms and under the hem of her jacket, and holds tightly to her shoulders and hips as if they were meant to dance together.

She shakes it off as she enters the station, only to find a cold stripe up her spine when she spots the Captain at her desk.

She shucks her bag and jacket and wordlessly follows him into his own cornered off office, where he firmly closes the door before bothering to greet her.

"Lieutenant," he offers, and she takes it with a curt nod. "Sir," she replies.

He plops into his desk chair, an unwavering wooden thing that can't be comfortable, and steeples his fingers under his chin.

"How do you feel about undercover work, Lieutenant?" he asks before she's even sat herself down.

Then again, with a question like that, she doesn't even need to.

It's winter when Hurley's heart starts pumping in the foreground again.

\-----

Prepping for the field doesn't take much. They know shitall about The Raven, so the case file's slim enough that she blazes through it over her lunch break. The rest of the racers she's already well acquainted with, busting most of them for minor violations here and there, but never for the big stuff.

Which, that's where the problem lies, isn't it? In the fact that these people know her face? 

In their meeting, Captain Bane had of course laid out the stakes of the op. And Hurley had listened, had understood, but maybe she hadn't weighed it heavily enough.

It was just-

Hurley didn't have any family. Dead parents who had been only children, she was an only child herself; she had the force, she supposed, but that only took you so far. And as a part of the militia, it was an unspoken thing not to get attached because it could change in a split second.

And she was dating anyone. And she didn't really have friends outside of work.

She was alone.

And she was so _tired_ of not doing anything. Of sitting idly. Of letting The Raven's case pass just around her desk for months.

So maybe she'd jumped the gun on this one. Maybe she hadn't considered everything. 

But she was going to beat the bullet if it was the last thing she did.

\-----

It's still winter when she's sent into the field, the cold finding a lull and sitting in it, not planning to go anywhere.

She wears ragged gear that keeps patches of her body warm, but only those patches and never anything more.

She learns to live in a knit-cap tugged down over her curls - deemed too identifying, something people remember, and won't hesitate to point out if she makes it out of this op alive. She keeps fingerless gloves on her hands to hide the birthmark on her palm, dusts make-up over her cheeks to stamp down some of her freckles.

It's hard, but not because she's someone else for all hours of the day. She actually doesn't mind settling herself in a life not lived in before. Mostly, it's remembering all the little things that make up this new life. 

One thing she slips into alarmingly easily is the thunder of battlewagons, the feel of a wheel beneath her hands, the sound of parts against parts against parts. The click-clicking of gears and the thwacking of wheels across rocky terrain are two of her favorites, she's found.

She starts small, knowing that she can't just immediately enter the big leagues lest she look like a rookie in both of her jobs. Not that it matters, it turns out, she's actually pretty good.

No, scratch that. Her modesty is something she vowed to leave behind, letting the shape of new months cradle a woman who is confident.

So, actually, she's pretty damn good. The first race she enters is a single, it's just her and nine other people. No teams, no weapons, no advantages save for the knowledge stored in her and the others' heads. 

And she wins.

By a bumper, but it's still a win.

Second place jumps from their compartment and shouts until spittle flies from heated jaws, but it's still a win.

She's already made enemies by daring to be anything other than what people want her to be.

But it's still a win.

She heads back to her shitty, glorified shack that night with her head a little higher and her jaw a little tighter. She drops her sack of gold pieces onto the offset table that's one of her two pieces of furniture, and flops over onto her other piece. The mattress is surprisingly comfortable for such short notice, only a few wayward lumps, but those dig into her calves and ankles if she positions herself just right, so it's not that big of a deal, she doesn't think.

She falls asleep that night, the first of many, with victory in her veins and stars in her eyes. It's been too long since she left a day with anything more than bone-deep weeriness.

It's nice.

\-----

Ever slowly, Hurley climbs her way up in the battlewagon scene. 

After her first win, all eyes are on her. But that was to be expected, right? A newcomer comes in and wins her first race all by herself? It would either raise a red flag or it would put a target on her back.

In some cases, it's both.

It's one night, a little over a month into the op, that she gets confronted by one of the day's competitors. 

A bunch of racers were getting together at a little bar on the outskirts of town, run by those friendly to the specific career of every patron that night. Hurley had almost declined, but when she considered it, she realized how much of an idiot she'd have to be to pass up a bunch of drunk possible-informants. 

She'd made sure her curls were tucked into her hat and her gloves were secure on her fingers, and she'd made her way over to the meet-up spot, having gotten the address from one of the more friendly-to-newcomers racers.

Hurley nurses a sharp ale and scopes out the crowd. She catches the eye of a human woman, sturdy and with a face full of piercings. She eyes Hurley over her beer and finishes out her game of pool before sweeping over. 

At first, in the way she approaches, Hurley thinks her night's about to go a lot differently.

But it doesn't.

The woman slips her glass onto the bar by Hurley, leaning unecessarily over her, wafting perfume around her, and Hurley has only two seconds before there's a fist crumpling her in half.

Tears spring to her eyes and she's sputtering as the woman growls out an obviously _not_ empty threat in her ear.

And something snaps inside of Hurley. 

Before she knows what she's done, the woman is on her back in front of her, the air pushed from her lungs and the color drained from her face.

Hurley's hands are alight with radiance in a second, reaching forward to heal the woman as apologies spill from her lips. She'd never meant-

"Get away from me. I hope you realize what you've started."

The woman pushes herself to her feet and scrambles from the bar before anything more embarrassing can happen.

Hurley's fingers are trembling and her face is burning and there are so many _eyes_ on her. With a low whistle, a small smattering of applause sounds. But it's too late, the ale has already turned to sludge in the bottom of her stomach and the target has already been painted on her back.

\-----

Every day is race day now. 

She wakes up each morning and goes through the motions because it's become so second nature to her that there are, in fact, motions to lull into.

She eats dusty rations while she tugs on her gear, loads up her wagon, and heads out for the tracks. The pickings on singles races are getting slimmer, but she doesn't have much of any choice. She's completely solo, and she can't trust anyone to let them get close enough for them to be a formidable team.

When she gets to the track that morning, dust is kicking up all around her. There's a druid-type with their palms pressed to the ground, frowning, but she shakes off the prickle at the base of her neck and heads for the sign in. Nothing can stand in the way of today's race.

She's been in the field for about two months now, and to put it lightly, it's all been leading to this moment. 

Not only will this give her enough funds to bump her up from the minor leagues, it's also the first time she's raced knowing it could have an impact on The Raven.

Hurley's been careful about the races she takes lately, how well she does in them, and how she behaves after them. She's nitpicked every action she makes in the public eye to curate herself into an art installation that The Raven will want to visit, and now. Well now, it's opening night.

\-----

She should've considered the fucking _dust_.

Her thoughts are hazy when she comes to, but that's the first coherent thing she can snatch from her racing mind. 

There's dust all in her mouth, dug deep into her pores, even pushed under her nails. It clings to the make up that's supposed to be evenly coating her cheeks and scrubs against her scalp in a wholly unpeasant way despite the day's slight breeze.

Shit. Breeze. Scalp. Curls.

Her aching and bloodied fingers find their way up, up, up into her free-flowing hair, and she curses heartily from behind the half-skewed bandana she wears to mask her face.

"Easy there, champ," a steady voice calls..

Hurley starts, not having realized someone was there to witness her tip over the precipice. Her eyes search wildly - there's still sun above her, still a crumbly ground beneath her, there's nowhere for anyone to hide-

Ah.

She's not hiding.

The Raven sits crosslegged, prim posture, delicate hands in her lap. She's the picture of relaxation.

"Where are we?" Hurley asks, though she wants to demand. Actually, she wants to shout _where have you been_ but she doesn't think that's appropriate nor contextually accurate.

"Goldcliff, babe," The Raven says and it's not affectionate. But it's not…not affectionate. The only thing concrete about it is that it makes Hurley's stomach flip in a way that should definitely be unpleasant, but decidedly isn't.

"No shit," she bites back. 

"Look," The Raven says, pointing a finger toward the eastern horizon. "Track's just over there."

And sure as shit, it is. Maybe a few dozen feet in total.

"And I'm - we're - over here because?" 

"Oh, you're over here 'cause you got your shit _flung_. They were taking bets on if you'd stop sliding or not, actually. I'm over here because I'm a concerned party."

"Right," Hurley says, quirking a brow. "And the marks in the dirt are a breadcrumb trail to help me get back to civilization safely?" she asks, nodding at the aforementioned marks.

The Raven's face is obscured by a simple black mask today, so Hurley can watch it get rearranged as the other woman's cheeks push it upward in a grin.

"Are you in the market for a partnership, by any chance?"

\-----

The Raven isn't what Hurley expected. 

Well, she is.

No. She isn't.

Okay. _The Raven_ is exactly what Hurley expected. She's crossed arms and a startling mask and a howling laugh that trails behind the battlewagon into the ears of those behind them.

She's ruthless when she needs to be, but she gets results. She's crafty and she's an expert observer and she's so keen and always knows what to say to diffuse or explode a situation.

She's slight and the shifts beneath her skin are compact, but she can hold her own. They've only fought off the track once in their month or so together, and it was with some asshole who got offended when the wheel popped off his glorified Fantasy Hot Wheels wagon as he rounded the track to take the lead from them.

He'd insisted it was a foul, but Hurley had gladly offered up her hands to show the magic inhibitors the event's organizer had stipulated - still tucked firmly around her wrists, where they'd stayed the entire race.

He'd had some choice words for The Raven, some choice words for Hurley, too, apparently, but he never did get around to them.

That's the other thing about The Raven. She refuses to take shit from any member of the entitled population that seems to flock to battlewagon racing.

Hurley appreciates that.

\-----

On the subject of things that Hurley had decidedly not expected of her newest coworker, she waits until the moon is high in the sky and the stars are bursting like corn kernels before she lets her mind wander to them.

When she took the op (the decision now months behind her) she had been briefed on every last stretch of knowledge they had on The Raven. Which obviously wasn't much, but the longer the days got and the farther the weeks dared to move, Hurley began to think that summing up The Raven in a brief packet was some cruelness akin to caging a wild animal.

Hurley rolls to her side, a small huff passing through her lips. A sheath of black hair, a twinkling eye, distorted lips, they all switch through her mind one rapidly after the other.

She shuts her mind off.

Best not to think about it, there's another race tomorrow.

\-----

Winter is starting to crumble. Pockets of warm air greet them as they take late night laps around the perimeter of Hurley's apartment in the wagon. Petals begin to pop up on cracks in the earth. And the sun seems to be stronger with each passing day.

Of those things, though, Hurley enjoys the late night overtime the most. Admitting that to herself feels like some sort of betrayal, but she figures it can't hurt her if she's the only one who knows it.

It started one night around one, maybe? Hurley had been tossed across her bed, staring up at the ceiling denying herself the thought of black hair and blacker eyes. The metal garage door had emanated a low thumping that increased in volume with each second Hurley ignored it.

Finally, she'd pushed out of bed and headed for the regular door positioned to the left of its rolling counterpart.

"Can I help you?" she'd growled, eyes still closed, though with the thickness of sleep or irritation no one would ever be able to figure out.

"C'mon, Mystery," a familiar voice had said.

That was what The Raven called her. Mystery. Hurley had never offered a name and the other woman had never asked for one. Somehow, it worked.

With vague reluctance or slight acceptance, Hurley had let herself be pulled from her temporary home and into the night.

"What's this about?"

"What isn't it about?"

"Touché."

The wagon's wheels had thundered around their invisible track with ease, taking each turn, each curve as if it were moving atop air alone.

At first it hadn't been something made for speaking. At first, Hurley thought it was made for studying one another.

But that was at first.

Soon it became this soft place of words that cushioned them with their gentleness. At first they were vague, or they were half-assed, or they were covered by so much lying that even a half-truth couldn't be found.

But that was at first.

Then it became a place of…trust, almost. They spoke of things they hadn't dared let loose in years. They traded stories evenly, cracked jokes, admitted. 

And every dawn, when Hurley returned to her home away from home, when The Raven - _Sloane_ \- watched from a safe distance away to make sure she got inside okay before leaving, they knew one another a little better. Maybe knowing each other better than anyone ever had.

\-----

And every dawn, for a few minutes, Hurley would push her back against the roller door, slide to the floor, and bury her head in her hands. Not because she was ashamed, and not because she felt regret.

Because her heart was hammering wildly in her chest and her cheeks were pinking and she couldn't keep the curling smile from her lips.

At first, she'd pressed her hand over her heart and quietly hissed instructions at it. Stamped it down. Locked it away in a tower - a princess cursed to not save herself.

But that was at first.

\-----

Warm spring air rushes through Hurley's curls. She tosses her head back in laughter, letting the air brush at the skin below her bandanna.

The sun shines down on them, and it feels like it was only for them, as they rolled across the finish line, skittering to that familiar halt just before the edge.

In a way, it's poetic. Or Hurley thought it was poetic, at least. Here she was, a woman on the edge of something, waiting to fall into everything. And here was that manifestation. A real ledge - one she'd never let herself coast over to balance the very real tipping point in her heart.

"We did it!" Sloane whoops. "Ten for ten, baby!" 

Her arms are in the air, fingers reaching for the sky. Her mask sits slightly askew - just enough that Hurley can see the pull to her mouth.

And here. Now. Hurley knows.

Her heart hammers happily in her chest and she lets Sloane pull her in for a tight, motor oil-scented hug. Hurley stands as tall as she can so she can bury her nose in the crook of Sloane's neck. Sloane returns the gesture, ducking in half to make it work.

"We did it, Hurls," Sloane whispers.

"Yeah, we did."

\-----

Hurley didn't care about who she had been before this. She'd been stumbling around lost for so long - she just wanted to be found for a while.

They'd figure it out.

They always figured it out.

\-----

"Okay, so," Sloane says, sitting cross-legged in front of Hurley, face bare, hair in a loose braid, smile broad. "You can't go around as Mystery anymore. You're a champion, Hurley, you deserve to look like one."

"You could've just told me I was cramping your aesthetic, Sloane." Hurley laughs. "I know I don't exactly fit into your whole emo shtick, but this is dramatic - even for you."

"Shut up," Sloane replies jovially. "I'm _trying_ to tell you I got you something, you doof."

She pulls a box from behind her, plain brown with a _ridiculous_ green bow shooting off of it like a patch of wildflowers. 

Hurley tears it open eagerly, tossing the rough crate paper bow to the side and pulling the lid off in two quick motions. Tissue paper in two layers is all that stands between her and whatever is inside the box.

"Is it poisonous?" she thinks to ask.

"Very," Sloane agrees. 

Hurley shucks the paper and stares down at the mask in front of her. 

"Sloane." It's all she can remember to say. 

"Do you like it?"

Desperately. Unequivocally.

"Yes."

This changes everything. 

"I love it."

She puts the mask on.

\-----

The Raven and the Ram. They become something more than either of them ever expected. They're infamous. They're champions. 

After their 10 for 10 streak, people start paying attention. Or rather, more attention than they had been.

The track is more ruthless than ever, but they manage. They get bruised and banged up and trash talked, but they manage. 

No, they thrive. 

\-----

Hurley sits in the middle of her mattress, a piece of paper smoothed out in front of her. People have taken notice in them, obviously, but those that had their eyes on them from the beginning are just getting agitated. 

Captain Bane wants her to come back. She has enough for a case. 

It would be so easy. 

A knock sounds from the roller door.

She stuffs the letter under the edge of her mattress, out of sight, and goes to the door. 

"We got invited to an underground competition."

Oh.

"Oh."

"This is huge, Hurls."

It's so huge. This could launch them forever. 

"Oh, gods, sorry, were you sleeping? I should've waited until morning, huh?"

"No, you shouldn't. Sloane. This is it."

"I know."

But she can't. She can't do this, it's not right.

"Hurley?"

"I'm not who you think I am."

She scrunches her eyes shut, spitting a line of explanation.

Sloane laughs, deep in her gut. "I know."

"What?"

"You suck at subtlety when it comes to me, Lieutenant," Sloane whispers, pushing a curl back from Hurley's eyes.

\-----

Hurley almost lets her go. She lets that moment pass, she says her sputtered goodnights. She closes the damm door!

\-----

She opens the door again.

\-----

Sloane stands on the other side, hands in her pockets, cosmos eyes sparkling in the starlight, mischievous smile now ever-soft.

\-----

Hurley kisses her. She never wants to stop kissing her. 

\-----

She knows this is it. Knows there's no going back.

One of Sloane's hand wraps around her wrist, the other cradling her neck sweetly.

And Hurley loves her so damn much.

\-----

It's spring when Hurley wakes up every morning more at peace with her life than ever before. 

It's spring when Sloane greets her with a kiss and a lousy one-liner, instead of just the latter.

It's spring when they burn the letter under Hurley's mattress and walk away from the ashes hand in hand.

\-----

It's closer to the end than the beginning when Sloane starts showing up with petals in her hair and the scent of new blossoms stuck to her skin. 

Spring is coming to a close when they curl around one another atop the blankets on Hurley's bed, still in their gear, hands entertwined between them. 

Sloane murmurs, "I'm losing myself, Hurley."

\-----

No.

"No."

\-----

"Yes."

\-----

It's summer when Hurley is once more Lieutenant, and Sloane is once again The Raven.

\-----

A ram mask hangs alone on a hook in a garage, just above a lumpy mattress which now holds half its usual quota.

The pillows and sheets still smell like cherry blossoms.

\-----

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @ desertrosetico !!


End file.
